Tuesday, December 18, 2012

[DMANET] PhD position in TCS at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

The Theory Group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology invites applicationsfor a PhD position in Theoretical Computer Science.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology is the leading technical university inSweden, with education and research spanning from natural sciences to allbranches of engineering including architecture, industrial management andurban planning. The Theory Group at KTH (http://www.csc.kth.se/tcs/)offers a strong research environment covering a wide range of researchtopics such as complexity theory and approximation algorithms, computerand network security, cryptography, formal methods and natural languageprocessing. The group has a consistent track record of publishingregularly in the leading theoretical computer science conferences andjournals worldwide, and the research conducted here has attracted numerousinternational awards and grants in recent years.

We are seeking a PhD student for the research project "Understanding theHardness of Theorem Proving" in the area of proof complexity withconnections to SAT solving.

Proving formulas in propositional logic is a problem of immense importanceboth theoretically and practically. On the one hand, this computationaltask is believed to be intractable in general, and deciding whether thisis so is one of the famous million dollar Millennium Problems (the P vs.NP problem). On the other hand, today so-called SAT solvers are routinelyused to solve large-scale real-world problem instances with millions ofvariables.

Proof complexity studies formal systems for reasoning about logicformulas. This field has deep connections to fundamental questions incomputational complexity, but another important motivation is theconnection to SAT solving. All SAT solvers use some kind of method orsystem in which proofs are searched for, and proof complexity analyses thepotential and limitations of such proof systems (and thereby of thealgorithms using them).

This project aims to advance the frontiers of proof complexity, and toleverage this research to shed light on questions related to SAT solving.This could potentially also involve research in related areas such as, forexample, circuit complexity, communication complexity, or hardness ofapproximation.

The project is led by Jakob Nordström (http://www.csc.kth.se/~jakobn) andis financed by a Breakthrough Research Grant from the Swedish ResearchCouncil and a Starting Independent Researcher Grant from the EuropeanResearch Council. The group currently consists of one postdoctoralresearcher and two PhD students (in addition to the project leader). Travel funding is included, and the group also receives short-term andlong-term visitors on a regular basis.

This is a full-time employed position, normally for five years including20% teaching, with salary according to KTH PhD student regulations(internationally very competitive). The successful candidate is expectedto start at the latest in August 2013, although this is to some extentnegotiable.

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